New Release Guest Post: Every Moment After by Joseph Moldover

Guest Post: Every Moment After by Joseph Moldover

Every Moment After by Joseph Moldover releases today and we are pleased to have Joseph on the blog today talking about his experience of writing fiction about someone else’s real life tragedy. Check out his thoughts below and add Every Moment After to your TBR. I can’t wait for my copy to arrive. Thank you, Joe, for being vulnerable and sharing and to Sarah at The YA Book Traveler for introducing us!

Guest Post

Writing About Somebody Else’s Tragedyby Joseph Moldover – April 2019

When my debut novel, Every
Moment After, is published next week I’ll have all the feelings you would
expect a writer in my situation to have: excitement that my work is finally out
in the world, nervousness about appearing publicly, and hope that people will
actually read it. It’s a huge moment for any author.

I’ll also be experiencing something else, though. My novel
is about the distant aftermath of a school shooting. It joins the survivors
eleven years later, on the day of their high school graduation, and follows
them through the summer as they try to move beyond the shadows of a tragedy we
are all too familiar with. Every Moment
After is about the fictionalized experience of something that has happened
to real people, as imagined by a writer they have never met.

It’s a strange feeling to write about someone else’s
tragedy. It can feel overwhelming, uncomfortable, and intrusive. Novelist
Richard Russo tells a story about being approached by a reader from Littleton,
Colorado (where Columbine High School is located) after he published his novel Empire Falls, which features a high
school shooting. “How could you?” the reader demanded. How could he write about
something so unspeakably painful, something that had happened in a real
community, and put it between two covers, and sell it?

The answer, I think, is that it is the job of a writer to
find a way to tell stories that aren’t being told. Some of these stories may
evoke grief, or fear, or shame. They’re uncomfortable stories, which is why they’re
often avoided. In our country today we frequently limit ourselves to certain
stories about school shootings, and we only allow the stories to go on for so
long. We don’t like to follow them for years, for decades, and to fully grasp
the depth of the loss.

How do you tell a story like that? How do you write about
something when many of us (myself included) find it almost unbearably painful
to consider? One way is to write about the event’s impact in the community
around it. When Perseus set out to kill the Medusa he knew that anyone who
looked directly at her would turn to stone, so as he approached he focused on
her reflection in his shield. Similarly, in my book I don’t directly depict the
shooting itself; instead, I write about the way that it’s reflected in the
lives of those left behind, parents and friends and siblings and ordinary
members of the community many years later, long after the news crews have gone
home and stopped telling the story.

Ultimately, I don’t know how the story I have created will
be received by general readers and it would be dishonest to say that I don’t
worry about how it will be received by survivors of school shootings. I wrote Every Moment After with as much care and
respect as I could. I hope that it is received in that spirit: as a book
written with the belief that we must find a way to talk about this pain in
order to move beyond it. The characters in Every
Moment After are more than the tragedy they survived, but it is part of
their story. School shootings have become part of our society’s story, but that
doesn’t have to define us. If we can learn to discuss it, we can move on.

Joseph Moldover is a writer and a clinical psychologist. His novel, Every Moment After, will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on April 9, 2019. He is online at www.josephmoldover.com and @jmoldover.

One response to “New Release Guest Post: Every Moment After by Joseph Moldover”

This is such a great guest post! Thank you so much for sharing it – and for giving me more information about the upcoming release! I am going to put in my request to the library now so I can get a copy!

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